The Rain Man

Or at least the computing power was. Douglas raised $5 million in seed money from BELO Corporation, a Texas-based broadcaster and publisher that does business in weather-sensitive regions of the country, and $3 million more from family and friends. “It took about $8 million to develop the technology,” he says.

DCI launched in 2000, initially pushing customized forecasts by e-mail and Internet, licensing the content to individual broadcasters and newspapers (“your Star Tribune My-Cast”). “It was not enough to make us profitable,” Douglas notes. “In some markets, we couldn’t sell it because it threatened the TV weatherpeople. The market for [Internet] banner ads collapsed as well. The last two years have been brutal. TV stations aren’t spending.”

DCI’s mission is to “push” weather information directly to subscriber cell phones and data devices, but the rollout of the technology was stalled in North America by the economic slump and overcapacity in the telecom industry. “It was a timing thing,” Douglas says.

That put Douglas in an uncomfortable position—the boss handing out pink slips. “We had to let some very good people go. It was like a very slow death. It’s painful to tell people you can’t employ them anymore because you don’t have the cash flow to pay them.

“Chicago taught me that no matter how good you are and how hard you try, eventually things beyond your control can undo you.” Now Douglas was seeing that bleak scenario take hold in a second arena.

During Douglas’s first year back in the Twin Cities, WCCO’s lead weathercaster, Rebecca Kolls, was seeking greener pastures and better hours in a syndicated gardening program. She told station management she would not renew her contract. WCCO called Douglas, whose noncompete agreement with KARE was long-expired. “It took six long months of discussions to put me in a comfort zone to do it,” Douglas recalls. “I had a horrible experience with CBS,” which now owned WCCO as well.

Douglas maintains he was reluctant to return to TV. “It’s a very difficult business. There’s so much management turnover, and it’s tough to have to constantly re-prove yourself to each of them. The last one only wanted me to wear white shirts. So I wore white shirts. The day you convince yourself you’re not replaceable is the day you get canned.”

Aware that DCI would be a capital-intensive long haul, Douglas accepted ’CCO’s entreaties, becoming its chief meteorologist in 1997. He surely had uses for the income.

Douglas’s love affair with the Twin Cities has once more grown to full strength. He says he rejected entreaties from the CBS Morning News in 2001, convinced this was where he needed to be. His “incredible” chemistry with Paul Magers is no more, and in the overhyped, highly marketed realm of local TV weather, a certain cynicism now reigns. But it’s tough to imagine local TV without Paul Douglas, just as it would be without Don Shelby—or will be without Magers. All have come to define the medium locally.

The Chicago experience has left Douglas keenly aware of how fertile a field the Twin Cities is for broadcast weather. “There is an appetite for weather here that there isn’t in other places,” says Douglas. He also contends the technology available to the broadcast weather community here is equaled only in two or three other markets. That level of investment has fostered a “competitiveness” among the local weather broadcasters that he didn’t sense in Chicago. “That said, I respect Ken [Barlow] and Dave [Dahl],” says Douglas.

The competition that has brought cutting-edge technology also demands cutting-edge interpretive skills for the wild arena of severe weather forecasting—those tense nights the Douglases of the world live for. “It’s the equivalent of election night for the anchors. And research shows viewers draw their conclusions about us on the quality of severe-weather forecasting.”

DCI remains a work in progress. “We’re very close to break-even,” he notes. “I’ve been loaning the company money again, but I see a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re growing by 10 to 20 percent a month.”

DCI’s data, radar images, and customized forecasts are now available from virtually all of the major U.S. wireless carriers. But competitors such as The Weather Channel and Accuweather have recognizable brands, and Douglas anticipates them forging exclusive deals with the wireless carriers. “So we have to have superior content and hedge our bets by going directly to the anglers and pilots,” Douglas explains, a bit incredulous that his high-tech company is now advertising in fishing magazines.

Twenty years after he came to Minnesota, Paul Douglas remains an unlikely celebrity, a bit too Everyman, a bit too awkward. Sitting in McCormick & Schmick’s one late August day, wearing a WCCO-logo shirt, Douglas meets a server’s request for a drink order with a “Have you got anything deep-fried or on a stick?”

The server stares, and then tries to answer seriously. It’s not clear that she gets the joke or even knows who’s telling it, but Douglas doesn’t stop trying, despite previous protestations that he’d prefer not to be noticed.

“He’s a resilient character, that’s for sure,” Paul Magers notes. “Doug’s one of those guys you can’t help but like. He’s even funnier in real life.”

And the jokes aren’t just about the state fair and Doppler radar?

“Naw,” Magers scoffs. “Doug’s not as innocent a fellow as he seems.”